Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

pyfound.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 886 posts

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#131

Post by XCabbage »

ksynwa wrote: post #87
XCabbage wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, what? There's no contradiction, or even tension, between these three positions: 1. "DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others" 2. "the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better" 3. "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???" so what exactly are you trying to say?

How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#132

Post by aspir »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #47
aspir wrote: post #29

This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk. Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.

Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.

This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.

Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#133

Post by wrsh07 »

lingrush4 wrote: post #109
wrsh07 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio of 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms. Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?

If they picked any of the conferences based on the gender of the attendees, then they were pretty obviously discriminating based on a protected characteristic and should face legal ramifications for it.

So unintentional discrimination is ok, but intentionally counterbalancing (even extremely tepidly) is very bad?

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#134

Post by takluyver »

XCabbage wrote: post #125

A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law: > NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott. So there's no…

And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?

Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#135

Post by pavon »

wrs wrote: post #31
djoldman wrote: post #26

> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws .” (Emphasis mine) I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs t…

If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.

Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#136

Post by burnerRhodov2 »

its-summertime wrote: post #114
burnerRhodov2 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats not true.... https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...

All of those are marked as "PURCHASE ORDER", I don't think the PSF applies for those. I don't think they are what one would consider funding

Grants are at the bottom.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#137

Post by dangus »

philipallstar wrote: post #76
dangus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of…

> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.

This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.

The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.

If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.

This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#138

Post by [deleted] »

japhyr wrote: post #126
qcnguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men. There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has b…

[deleted]

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#139

Post by takluyver »

politician wrote: post #130
takluyver wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.

> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch. However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weigh…

OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#140

Post by hn_shill_202510 »

japhyr wrote: post #126
qcnguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men. There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has b…

if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
Post reply on HN